Visionary modernist art museum director, Newark Museum,
1909-1929, and librarian theorist. Dana was
born to Charles Dana, Jr., a general
store manager, and Charitie Scott Loomis (Dana). In 1874, Dana entered Dartmouth College. He gained an
A. B. in 1878
intent on becoming a lawyer, but a diagnosis of tuberculosis forced him to
the drier climate of Colorado. Dana worked as a surveyor, part of the team
who discovered the ruins of the Mesa River cliff dwellers in 1881. He returned
to New York (state) and passed the bar exam in 1883, but ill health drove him
again to Minnesota and then back to Colorado, selling real estate and again surveying. While a lay leader in the Unitarian church, he met and married Adine Rowena Waggener
(1860-ca.1932) in 1888. Dana's career as a librarian began after an
article he wrote criticizing public education led to Dana's appointment as the first
librarian of Denver School District, the precursor of the Denver Public Library.
His visionary library included picture files, reference shelves open to the
public and a circulating picture collection (begun in 1891), primarily for
children. In 1898 Dana returned to New England where he founded the Springfield, Massachusetts library system.
Dana wanted to incorporate the city's art and natural history museums into the
library system, but met with stiff resistance from the wealthy private collector
and curator of the art museum. He resigned in 1901 moving to the Free
Public Library of Newark, New Jersey, the following year. Dana built the Newark library into one of the most successful urban public
libraries in the United States, creating branches and specialized libraries, promoting the library vigorously. He also returned to his idea of
running an art museum. In 1903 he mounted an exhibition of American art in
the library, and by 1905 he had created a science museum on one floor of the library. Dana
merged the museum into one for the arts as well, now called the Newark Museum in 1909, under the
rubric of the Newark Museum
Association, which he founded the same year. Dana's main interest was industrial art and design. He personally built
many of the
display cases from his home carpentry shop. Dana established contact
with the director of the Folkwang Museum in Germany, Karl Osthaus.
The result was the 1912 show "Modern German Applied Arts," a groundbreaking show of over 1,300 items
by the Deutscher Werkbund, including metalwork and advertisements. A junior museum for children
was established in 1913. Dana's dogmatic lobbying for industrial design resulted
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows of commercial products in 1917. During World War
I Dana resisted much of the anti-German sentiments, refusing to remove German-authored books from
library shelves. He hired the art historian Holger Cahill in 1921 to the staff of the Newark Museum,
encouraged Cahill to organize shows on folk art, American primitives, and
American folk sculpture. Dana declined honorary degrees from Dartmouth, Rutgers, and Princeton.
In 1923, Dana spearheaded a touring show on Chinese art, one of the first in the
country. Though Dana distained treasure-quality art, the wares of
"archaeologists, excavators and importers," as he put it, he invested in
American artists. Years before larger American museums acquired indigenous
artists, the Newark Museum owned paintings by John Sloan and Max Weber. By 1923,
Dana's health began to decline. The museum moved to separate quarters in
1926. Still energetic, he founded an apprenticeship program for display and museum curation, one of whose initial students was the later Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Canning Miller. Dana hired Miller to assist with Cahill's work in the Museum. In 1929, however Dana underwent an
operation which resulted in a lingering infection. He collapsed the same year at
Grand Central Station, NY, and died at an area hospital. Dana is buried in
Woodstock, VT. His personal papers are contained at The Newark Public Library and the
American Library Association Archives, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.

Dana's strong populist impulse made him a pre-cursor to
modern art museum's attention to broad public appeal. His theory of
culture was derived more from the theory of Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) than
art theorists. "Museums must
advertise," he wrote in a letter to the New York Times, an extreme notion
at the time. His art museum--a term the Newark institution has never used--like his libraries, was devoted to show
designs to educate local laborers. Dana believed in museum displays which
re-enforced the object's context, as opposed to the prevailing esthetic theories
of installation ("the object as contemplative piece") by curators such as
Boston's Benjamin Ives Gilman. A social progressive, he hoped to liberate the public from fashion
obsolescence, espousing an American aesthetic of machine-style objects produced
from the country's industrial prowess. His legacy in museology is the
acceptance of industrial design as part of American art museums. "Beauty,"
he wrote elsewhere, "has no relation to age, rarity or price." He was not
a scholar and did no research on art. LS